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Gnumeric Turns 5
Jody Goldberg writes "Five years ago, Miguel committed the first code for Gnumeric to CVS. In a testament to the quality of the code several lines are still in use. Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more. This seemed like a good time to thank all the people who have contributed to Gnumeric over the years. We're about to start the run up to the the next stable release which will be out in a few
weeks and we look forward to continuing work with GNOME, and the community at large to produce the most powerful spreadsheet in the world."
I use gnumeric all the time, I read MS xls files without any problems. Its also faster to start, and looks better, than OO (which I also like). Its my favorite of all of the Linux office apps.
I use MS Excel almost everyday for data analysis, and the most annoying part is that number of records cannot exceed 65536 in Excel. Anyting larger than that, we need to get the data into Access and work in it, and that's not very fast and easy. What's the limit in Gnumeric?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
How does Spreadsheet in OpenOffice perform against Gnumeric in terms of functions, compatibility with other spreadsheet programs ect?
This project could do with some marketing. I genuinely had no idea that it was even comparable to Excel in terms of features, and I'm no Linux n00b. One of the problems with OS software in general, I guess. And what has to change.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I'm curious what was added beyond what is offered by Excel. Any really interesting little tidbits?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I'm serious. People in the Windows world use Excel not only to calculate stuff, but as some kind of application platform. Personally I think that's stupid in most cases, but not offering it is even worse.
Maybe I just couldn't find it anywhere, but: Is Gnumeric easily scriptable? It doesn't have to be Excel or VBA compatible (in fact, about every other language would be better, IMHO), it doesn't need an integrated IDE with debugger etc. like Excel has, but the only thing I could find so far is a "plugins" directory containing .so files - that can't be it. Is there something better, and if so, why the f**k isn't it documented prominently?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
TheLastUser,
In your experience, can you comment on whether the Microsoft excel-format security flaws and macro virus exploits affect Gnumeric in any way? I am verry curious as to how Gnumeric implements an unstable Microsoft format without rendering some sort of security risk to a local user exploit.
Thankyou.
It looks like a great replacement for Excel... why not make it buildable on Windows too?
I know that half the point of creating great desktop apps for Linux is to encourage the use of Linux on the desktop, but it also limits the usage (and therefor usage and availability of developer support too) of the product.
These days, there's almost no technical limitation to writing code that can be compiled on multiple platforms. Usually the limitation is the UI toolkit (gee, like Gnome?), but there are many cross-platform ones available too (like Tcl/Tk, etc.)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
However, while they both support all sorts of Windows formats and predecessor Linux formats (OLEO, e.g.), they don't support each other's file format!
Feel free to mod me down, but working with ... For this kind of
...
really large spreadsheets in Gnumeric is
a pain; it's way too slow. Reading in a tab-delimited
file with 12 columns and 40,000 rows takes minutes
(this is microarray data). I have compared
Kspread, Gnumeric, StarOffice, OpenOffice, even
Siag (scheme in a grid). They are all substantially
slower in than MS Excel
work, I'm afraid I really see myself forced to
work with Excel (which, incidentally, runs
fine in Crossover Office; this is what I use on a
daily basis, because 1) Windows as a platform for
my kind of work is a joke and 2) I despise Microsoft)
In other words, if I had the time to do work on
Gnumeric, I would be only too happy to start working
on its speed when dealing with huge spreadsheets
If Linux and GNU are going to get big, they have to innovate and write better software, not just emulate what the big guys are doing.
Interesting. So if Linux and GNU stuff perfectly emulated existing commercial (and expensive) software, which do you think would be big?
In many ways open source DOES innovate. Microsoft recently "discovered" Kerberos. IIS has been playing catchup with Apache forever (except in terms of conf wizards). Apple "discovered" BSD (well actually NEXT did, same diff). IE supposedly might finally have pop up ad blocking that the Mozilla has had for a loooong time.
I get your point, but I think you would agree that compatibility with existing popular applications is more important than new innovations. Once Gnumeric and Excel of equal feature-wise, then the race to innovate can begin.
Finkployd
Or at least mods for it? I don't like to use decimal.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I recently integrated a macro preprocessing engine written in C++ into an ancient, pre-ANSI-C assembler that I didn't write. :-)
At least language wise, those two languages are just close enought to be dangerous. The styles were completely different. But I was able to integrate them by keeping the modularity sane.
To integrate something like gnuplot into gnumeric, they'd have to work on keeping the interface small, well defined, but still large enough to support all the desired functionality. Not impossible, but not a task I personally would envy.
Program Intellivision!
Please contact me (jody@gnome.org)
We've got a new charting engine in gnumeric now that will be released as a standalone library after gnumeric-1.2.x. Its goals are similar to gnumeric but on the charting side. Which means that it aims to have a superset of MS Excel's functionality. Thankfully that is alot easier for charts. The framework still needs a few extensions before I'm ready to split it out, but its already pretty capable. Adding a png or svg exporter would be fairly simple.
guppi is deprecated and unmaintained. The next Gnumeric will have a completely redone graphing framework.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
How well does Gnumeric handle xls files from non-English versions of Excel?
In particular, the formulae in non-English versions of Excel are saved into the xls files using their non-English names - can Gnumeric cope with that? (This is totally brain dead behaviour, IMHO, - not only does it mean that an English Excel can't understand non-English files, but if the function name has a non-Latin 1 character in it and you don't have that font, then even if you have the right language version of Excel you still can't edit the formula, only run it! This kills sharing Excel spreadsheets internationally. Why, oh why didn't they use numeric codes in the file and translate?). [Disclaimer: I've seen this for Excel = v.97, haven't looked at newer versions.]
As a side question, how does Gnumeric save formulae in its own-format files?
I originally tried Gnumeric a long time ago, in v. 0.something, at the time it didn't have the functionality I needed. I shall certainly try it again. Thanks for all the hard work!
it is truly an awesome SS, except for one little thing. you can't formt the cells to have vertical text. the dialog box says unfinished. which says alot about OSS because ni commercial app would ever have that, but it still remains undone. i wish that one little thing would get done. if i was good enough i'd work on it, but i ain't. could some one please!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Contrary to what have been advertised, there _are_ something that Excel does, that Gnumeric doesn't.
For example, Gnumeric still doesn't do Pivot Table.
While I do understand that Pivot Table isn't really a big deal to many, there are times that functions such as Pivot Table comes _very_ handy.
Please, Gnumeric Developers, please put the Pivot Table on top of your "todo list".
Thank you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !